Barbara Bush: A Memoir.

• Author: Clift, Eleanor

Inside this 532-page tome is a lean and mean 170-page book struggling to get out. Barbara Bush pads her memoir with guest lists, dinner menus, and assorted trivia about "the grands," as she calls her 12 grandchildren. Most people, of course, think of Barbara Pierce Bush as the fortunate young woman from Rye, New York, who married the first man she ever kissed--George Bush, the dashing young Navy officer in wartime--and who frequently says how lucky she has been in life. It takes a patient reader to ferret out the true Barbara from the protective shell she has constructed around herself through the years. What emerges from a careful reading is a shrewd woman whose frequent sarcasm and deprecation--directed at herself and at others--seem to be in part a reaction to suffering a lifetime of quiet put-downs. An example: If you thought "Bar," her nickname, was short for Barbara, you'll be pained to learn that "Bar" is named after a horse. When she and George first started courting, the Bush family had a horse-pulled wagon. The Bush boys loved to tease, and George's brother, Prescott, thought it was especially amusing to tag Barbara with the horse's name, Barsil, which became Bar.

Not many young women could take a barb like that and wear it for the next half-century as a badge of honor. But self-deprecation is Barbara Bush's ostensible specialty. When Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of the Soviet leader, asked why she was so popular, Barbara said, "I felt it was because I threatened no one--I was old, white-headed, and large. I also told her that I stayed out of my husband's affairs." Barbara and her handlers carefully cultivated her image as a benign, nurturing grandmother. And it worked: No one ever accused Barbara Bush of secretly running the show, a charge just about every other recent First lady, including Nancy Reagan, has had to fend off. Yet, any reporter who covered the Bush White House knew that Barbara was powerful in her own way and that she could be mean and vindictive. In this book, for example, she has almost nothing to say about Nancy Reagan, with whom she was Second Lady for eight years, and the silence is telling.

One of Barbara's most memorable public moments came in 1984 when she said Geraldine Ferraro, then the Democratic nominee for vice president, was something that "rhymes with rich." It was an early glimpse into Barbara's hit-and-run style followed by a smile. She parried with an apology, fed to her by a friend, saying she...